In recent years, computer networks have grown very popular with computer users as a means of communicating and exchanging information. Such networks allow personal computer users to connect with each other, either directly or through a central communication point, and to exchange information by using a protocol common to each personal computer in each network. Corporations and businesses now commonly network computers used by their employees in "intranets" which are networks that have limited access to certain persons and/or computers. Such intranets are often protected by elaborate security systems or "firewalls" which prevent unauthorized users from accessing the intranet. By contrast, the term "Internet" has been adopted to describe the publicly available network to which virtually every personal computer in the world has access. Recent improvements in the software available for accessing and searching the Internet have made the Internet a very popular source of information which can even be utilized by novices to computer technology.
Computers communicate on intranet and internet networks by the use of a common set of standards for exchanging data known as the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol ("TCP/IP"). To initiate communication on such a network, a user, known as a "client" contacts another computer on the network, known as the "server" or "host," by using various publicly available software programs. In public networks such as the Internet, these programs use various protocols to organize information in a manner which allows the user to locate and access files of interest to the user. For instance, some files are organized by a hierarchical menu system known as the "gopher." A user can search the Internet by linking from an Internet site of interest, or by entering the uniform resource locator ("URL") of the file on the gopher which the user wants to review.
The most popular and user-friendly protocol for organizing information on the Internet has become the World Wide Web (the "WWW" or "Web"). The Web links information by associating items of interest through a common scripting language known as the Hyper Text Markup Language ("HTML"), and transmits these HTML-based files between servers and clients using a common protocol known as the Hyper Text Transfer Protocol ("HTTP"). A Web user searches the Web by starting at the user's "home page," which is created and operated HTML. From the home page, the Web user searches out and retrieves information by using "web browser" software. Web browsers allow a Web user to retrieve and render images and texts from files of interest to the user's computer. Web browsers operate by allowing a Web user to identify a "Web link" of interest on a Web page and then execute the Web link to transfer the computer data associated with the Web link from the host computer containing that data to the Web user's computer. Web links perform this transfer of computer data by communicating the URL of the desired file to the host.
The increased usage of the Internet has generated considerable interest in commercial applications of the Internet. As is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,553,239 by Health et al., on-line services have made the Internet easily accessible to computer novices through the use of central servers. For a slight fee, these on-line services provide an access to the Internet, with a central server acting as a point of entry and as an intermediary between the Internet user and the Internet sites selected by the user. The increased number of persons accessing the Internet through such on-line services and otherwise has created a tremendous opportunity for businesses to market goods and services to a large captive audience.
Businesses have responded to the available market of Internet users by creating a large number of Web pages which users can review. However, a number of businesses have developed extensive computer systems for marketing goods and services which do not use formats and protocols that can be readily sent over the Internet. Thus, the business might create a web page for Internet users to view but might not be able to efficiently translate data from existing formats into formats which Internet users can review.
Accordingly, both Internet users and businesses would benefit from a system or method which allows Internet users to access and review information stored in the computer systems used by businesses, regardless of the format used to store and recover the business information. However, such a system would have to overcome the difficulty presented by the wide array of hardware and software systems with which users access the Internet. Further, when a user accesses the Internet from an intranet, or when a firewall protects a corporate system in an intranet, the difficulty of accessing and presenting business information is compounded.
Existing systems such as Carbon Copy, PC Anywhere, Outreach and the systems disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,241,625 by Epard, et al. and U.S. Pat. No. 5,577,254 by Gilbert do allow a client computer to receive and render the same monitor screen. data as is rendered by a host computer, but such systems require compatibility between the client and host computers with respect to the hardware and/or software used by the client and the host computers. Thus, in order to use these existing systems, the client and host have to first exchange hardware and/or software and have to know each other's network address, known as an IP address. In addition to these complications, these existing systems require considerable processing by each computer and are thus slow in use. Further, these systems require protocols that are not commonly used on public networks such as the Internet. Thus, corporate intranets that might allow access to the Internet through Gopher and HTTP protocols may not allow an unrecognized system-specific protocols of these existing systems to pass through their firewalls.